The lovely open star cluster, the Pleiades, has been called the Seven Sisters since antiquity. But nobody sees seven stars in this showpiece of the late autumn and winter, not by unaided eyeball and certainly not by telescope.
Like a tiny kite of bright points, in November the Pleiades are visible in the east after sunset and are easily seen until dawn. They lodge on the shoulder of the constellation Taurus the bull. Bruce McClure, in an article posted by EarthSky.org, says November is often

Enrico Fermi, the Nobel-winning nuclear physicist who was one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, arguably is best remembered for a lunchtime comment that has no connection to his specialty. In 1950, he and three other scientists were chatting about the possibility of advanced alien civilizations when he asked something like, "Where is everybody?"
The question has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox, the most famous query about extraterrestrial civilizations, one that is recited and argued

Of the comets I've seen, no two were alike, ranging from a monster that, counting its coma of particles, was the biggest thing in the solar system, to a puny streak that -- once it had dipped out of view from the northern hemisphere -- turned into a dazzling spectacle with multiple tails.
As NASA points out, comets are "dirty snowballs" that coalesced when the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, mostly "ice coated with dark organic material." The agency also describes them as

Earthlings should be treated to a beautiful holiday surprise in December, Comet Wirtanen 46P.
Dr. P. Clay Sherrod, the researcher, educator and author whose Arkansas Sky Observatories are renowned as "America's oldest private research science and observatory facility," wrote, "As this comet is slowly closing in on perihelion this December 16 (closest pass by the sun) it will also swing closely by Earth four days later in December and it perhaps might be as bright as 3rd magnitude, or even a bit

During my years as a newspaper science reporter, I sometimes asked astronomers and physicists a question that still puzzles me: natural laws govern everything from radiation released by atomic bombs to the combinations of molecules, from galaxy shapes to ripples in a pond -- were these rules present at the time of the Big Bang, before a single atom had formed?
That is, do the rules predate the objects they govern?
A saying by the rebel priest John Ball (who lived from about 1338 until his

As I write, NASA is in the midst of a three-day workshop in Houston discussing ways to detect alien civilizations. Thomas Zurbuchen, the agency’s associate administrator in the Science Mission Directorate, tweeted on Tuesday:
"I’m excited to announce that #NASA is taking the 1st steps to explore ways to search for life advanced enough to create technosignatures: signs or signals, which if observed, would let us infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe. …" The NASA

Utah is suffering the worst summer in many years, in terms of conditions for astronomy.
Wildfires that are exacerbated or caused by global warming have been burning up the West, including this state, contributing to a sometimes-dangerously smoky atmosphere. Smoke will soften astronomy images into blurred messes and throw off color balance. When I found sites where the smoke had cleared, by an unfortunate coincidence windy skies made the stars twinkle and bounced my telescope around too wildly

On September 30, 1854, readers of the Illustrated London News were treated to an astonishing view of something they had seen all their lives but never in such detail, the Moon. Assembled from photographs by John Hartnup, astronomer at the Liverpool Observatory, and by the Photographic Society of Liverpool, the double-page woodcut showed maria, craters, mountain ranges and debris rays.
Most of these geological features weren't well understood at the time. Speaking of a lecture by Professor John

The first galaxies formed in two stages, according to a scientific paper published Aug. 16 -- and some of them remain in the Milky Way's orbit.
Mysterious "dark matter" played a vital role in the process, the paper maintains. Dark matter is the name given to material or an effect that was present after the Big Bang and about which little is known other than its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.
Findings are presented in "The Imprint of Cosmic Reionization on the Luminosity Function of

I remember the discovery of pulsars; or maybe I don’t recall the actual announcement but discussions about them soon afterwards. With the passage of half a century, it’s hard to sort out. Word came in February 1968 that scientists had detected radio beacons in the cosmos, of the strangest type ever recorded, signals that repeated rapidly and at precise intervals. Nobody could resist wondering if the signals were the product of a spacefaring civilization.
The findings came through the operation

The first time I read Walden all the way through, I thought Henry David Thoreau was stretching a comparison beyond its breaking point. In the chapter "Spring," he writes, with quotations chosen from two separated paragraphs,
"Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village. ... Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace with one another,

The galaxy Messier 33 is a beautiful spiral star-city that is relatively close and therefore huge from our viewpoint, but it has such low surface brightness that it can be hard to find by telescope. M33 is also unusual for other reasons, including that a New General Catalog object resides within it.
A quick explanation of the Messier (M) and New General Catalog (NGC) numbers:
*** Charles Messier, 1730-1810, who served as chief astronomer at the Marine Observatory, Paris, searched diligently

Sunday night presented one of those astronomical alignments that can soothe the mind: Venus and the Moon were nearly cuddling, about one degree apart.
[Here and above: telephoto view of the conjunction of Venus and the Moon, taken by Richard Garrard of the Utah Astronomy Club about 9:30 p.m., June 15, 2018. This exposure was made to show the part of the moon illuminated by Earthshine.]
Cory and I were out to shop and walk in the park. We first noticed the lovely conjunction as we prepared to

We had just called on a globular star cluster and Paul Ricketts wondered where our next adventure should take place. Knowing he likes nebulas, I suggested that we try to photograph one. He chose a complex, sprawling, breathtaking example in the summer sky, the Eagle Nebula. Ricketts ordered the University of Utah’s great 32-inch-diameter telescope to slew toward the nebula, technically named Messier 16 (M16), and the instrument began to shift position.
This was Saturday night, June 30. A few

NASA’s new planet hunting satellite, TESS, has entered its planned orbit, says a Utah native who is a member of the science team analyzing data to discover planets beyond the solar system -- and the last he checked it was "operating properly.”
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, FL, on April 18. It looped through a unique program of complex orbits, taking it around the Earth three times and past Moon before settling into a stable orbit that

An unforgettable experience at the eyepiece, almost akin to seeing Saturn, is one's first look at a globular cluster. Hanging in the black of space is a spherical mass of stars whose center is so tightly packed that individual orbs cannot be picked out, while around the ball are stellar streamers and loops, the whole conglomeration glowing like gems. They are a galaxy's brilliant diamond brooches.
As far as we know, star clusters are of two types, open and globular (the preferred pronunciation

Who hasn't read books or seen movies in which Martian organisms play a critical role? We could enumerate dozens of space operas, pulp fiction books and sci-fi films. From the clothing-challenged but beautiful Deja Thoris in Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 novel A Princess of Mars to the movies Mars Attacks! and Total Recall, a favorite locale for fictional alien life is the fourth planet. The narratives get pretty ridiculous. But today, Martian aliens may be verging on reality, if only life in

Jupiter, our solar system's king of planets, has been known as a special light in the sky probably since early humans stopped scratching long enough to look up. It and the other anciently-known planets are distinguished from the stars by relative brightness (most), their propensity to wander and their refusal to twinkle. The ancient Greeks named it Zeus, after the ruler of the gods, and the Romans carried on with their own version of the name, which we use today.
As Bruce McClure of

I was stoked for my astronomy trip Wednesday. For the first time in many months, my telescope was repaired, the new camera system was fixed, weather predictions were for mostly clear skies and the moon would set early. I reviewed the night's most interesting photographic subjects and wrote this list of possibilities --
"For May 16, 2018:
"NGC 4438 (and NGC 4435), 'The Eyes,' in the Virgo Galaxy, part of Markarian’s Chain. Take a deep exposure, with long subs, to pick up the many smaller

Civilization is losing a vital force that mystified and inspired humans for thousands of years: the dark night sky. Until about a century ago it was a universal source of awe, beauty and spiritual feelings; an anchor for legends; a cosmic signal about when to plant, and an ever-present reminder of Nature’s cycles. Now the resource is destroyed in many regions throughout the world. Of course, the impacts are worst in cities, towns and suburban areas.
A photograph of nighttime Salt Lake City